Chapter 7

When I woke up it was because the hot sun shining through the leaves had fallen across my face. My cheek was hot and my left side and arm were irritated from lying on the rough sand. I sat up reluctantly, brushed the sand off myself, and chased away a small cloud of fleas that drummed a few inches in front of my face. I saw the black beach scattered with round grayish- white stones, and like a memory of something that had happened a long time ago I remember crawling across it on my hands and knees. The sand was coarsely crushed black lava, sharp and uncomfortable to the flesh. The rocks of the island where they stuck out of the vegetation were the same grayish black, crumbled and streaked with bird droppings.

At the edge of the water the beach was littered with debris: vegetable scraps, a scum of oil mixed with salt foam, here and there a box or a piece of a broken crate. I squatted down and washed off the sand in the sea. The water was cool and felt good, but the salt irritated the places that had been rubbed raw by the sand. It seemed to be around noon now and the sun was high in the sky. Across the water I could see a larger island, a long lump on the horizon perhaps ten miles away with a thread of smoke rising out of one end. Except for the smoke there was no sign of life on it. At one place I thought I could make out a black spot against the jungle, and after I looked at it for a long time I decided it was the hulk of a burnt-out ship- Farther to the west there was another island in the sea, a low volcanic cone with a fringe of green around the bottom of it. The sky v/as clear now, with only a few scraps of gray cloud that slowly dissolved in the sun.

Out in the open the heat was making me dizzy. I went back and sat in the shade of the thicket where I had slept. The hot sun had dulled my will and I sat apathetically, reluctant to move but not really tired. Over my head was a low arching tree with fan-like leaves which was perhaps a pandanus, although I had never taken a very great interest in botany. The tree hung down almost to the ground and if you crawled far enough back it was like a cave, cool and smelling of decayed vegetation. Now I made a new discovery: the black sand was full of fleas. There was decomposed vegetable matter buried in it and it smelled rotten, and when I kicked it with my bare heel a small cloud of fleas would arise and hover over the hole. The salt had dried on my skin and made it itch; my eyelids burned a little. I realized I would have to go look for water.

After I had explored a little I saw that leaving the small strip of beach where I had landed was impractical, at least without shoes. The jungle behind the beach was an impenetrable mass of sharp twigs, with gnarled roots underfoot and various kinds of nettles. At each end of the short beach there was an outjutting of volcanic rock. I tried climbing up one of these miniature cliffs to see what was on the other side, but my feet were softened by the water and salt and the rocks were too sharp. I did manage to get high enough to see what was beyond. The islet I was on was small, a half-mile long and only a few hundred yards wide, and it was part of a chain of volcanic rocks connected by shallow reefs. The water was breaking a little on the reef and I saw that theoretically it would be possible to wade over to the next islet, but it was smaller than my own and I couldn’t see that it was any better. I didn’t care very much. I was curiously tranquil. In the intellectual part of my mind I was aware that fresh water would have to be found, but somehow nothing mattered, as though my brains were made out of wax and sitting in the sun had softened them. My mind was perfectly logical, even lucid, but it was terribly passive. I didn’t think about the night before or what had happened to the ship, or try to explain to myself why I had acted the way I did. That part of my mind was numb, and if I happened to come across that kind of thought I just drifted around it for the time being. There had never been any doubt according to old-fashioned heroism I should have gone down to the engine room to start the fire pumps and got blown up with the rest of them, but I wasn’t a copy-book hero and nobody else on that ship was either, and it was too much to think about. It was as though that part of my head was stuck full of glue; later perhaps it would melt and I could start thinking about it again, but right now it was too much effort.

All that existed was the present: I was sitting in the sand with some green leaves over my head, and the universe around me seemed to be a series of senseless phenomena succeeding each other without any connection. I observed everything, one detail at a time: the fleas in the sand, the scum of oil on the beach, the fecaloid shape of Guadalcanal across the water with the thread of smoke hanging over it, an inch of raw carrot which I found lying at the edge of the water, probably dropped overboard by the cook on some passing ship. I accepted the carrot as a natural phenomenon like the fleas, and I ate it although it was saturated with fuel oil. It tasted neither good nor bad. I wasn’t very hungry anyhow.

It did, however, make me thirsty. I got up unwillingly and a little stiffly and made a second attempt to force my way into the underbrush behind the beach in search of water. I wrestled through it a foot at a time, limping over the sharp twigs and fighting branches that snapped back and hit me in the face. After I had gone perhaps ten yards, which took me a half an hour, I found some putrid-looking green water in a hollow in the ground. I drank two or three double handfuls of it, felt sick, and immediately threw up. This left me weak and I sat down where I was and made an effort to think for the first time. The salt and the fleabites had left my skin raw, and now under it a dull irritability began to spread through the flesh, a kind of smoldering resentment against whatever it was that had forced me to deal with these ignominies, fleas, raw skin, vomiting, thirst. Then I realized what I was angry at and what had become my enemy: the survival instinct. Well, what was so damned important about staying alive anyhow? That was the question that needed answering. It was this stupid instinct that had made me swim around half the night until I was exhausted, and now it had me floundering around like a madman in this sharp underbrush looking for water. And I had never asked the simple question: why? Now that it had occurred to me there was no real imperative that obliged me to stay alive the whole problem became much simpler. I grappled my way back to the pandanus on the beach and lay down again. I felt I was somehow getting even with something, it wasn’t quite clear what. The Universe perhaps. I went to sleep tranquilly in spite of the thirst.

When I woke up I began to see it was not as easy to die of thirst as I had thought. My mouth and throat had dried, and every time I swallowed or moved my lips it felt as though the flesh was cracking. My tongue was too large and seemed to lack connection with its muscles; it lay in my mouth like an awkward lump. It was no good, I would have to go look for water. I spent the rest of the afternoon searching, and toward evening I found a pint or so in a crevice in the rocks at the end of the beach. It was rainwater, sheltered from the sun by an overhanging rock, and only a little salty. I drank a little, and as soon as I had climbed back down to the beach I realized I hadn’t drunk enough and was still thirsty. I had to climb back up the sharp lava rocks again, and each time I went up I knocked a little more skin off my hands and feet. Coming down the second time I cut my foot badly on the inside of the instep. The blood that welled out was a blackish red, surprisingly thick. It was the first live and vital thing I had seen for some time and I squatted on the beach with my legs turned up and contemplated this odd substance coming out of the bottom of my foot. It didn’t hurt particularly but it reminded me that an organism, for instance a human body, had a metabolism and needed food to sustain itself, and you were no more free to ignore this than you were to ignore the problem of water. The survival instinct was better organized than I thought. If you didn’t drink water your throat hurt, and then hurt more, and then hurt like the devil, and finally you had to go look for water. It was a kind of an enemy inside that made you live whether you wanted to or not. Probably it was the same with food, and carrot ends really wouldn’t do in the long run. I gave up. The life instinct was only the last of a long series of things I had surrendered my free will to.

I slept hungry that night in the black shadows under the pandanus, and the next morning I found something better to eat. In the sea off the end of the rocks, two feet under water, tiny shellfish grew in thick black clusters set on edge like razor blades. Standing up to my knees in water I wrenched off chunks of them, cutting my hands on the sharp edges. Each individual mollusc was about the size of a man’s fingernail, and inside was a tiny pinpoint of meat. After several unsuccessful attempts to open them with my fingers (more cuts) I learned to smash them with a rock. In this way, with an hour’s work could collect half a handful of fishy black spots of meat. For the two days I spent most of my waking hours prying the nourishment out of minute shards of shell, each piece of meat about the size of something a civilized man would pick out of his teeth. I began to see why the Solomon Islanders had never developed a civilization; they were too busy smashing molluscs. The fleas were attracted by the fishy smell and settled on the meat where I had piled it on a rock. Before I ate it I brushed them off, at least most of them, and if any of them were left that was their lookout. In between I would climb up the sharp lava to visit my water hole. At a handful three times a day there was still enough for a couple of days; by that time perhaps it would rain.

Around the end of that second day I became aware of a terrible mistake. My skin was softened by the night in the water and I had spent two days in the sun stark naked, and I was getting badly sun-burned. The skin was already peeling, especially on the buttocks where I was chafed from sitting on the sand, and the new skin that came out underneath was pink and sensitive. I peeled off ribbons of skin and threw them on the sand. Perhaps the fleas would like it. Take that, you bastards! I’ve eaten you too, on a piece of mollusc meat. In the long run we helped each other, the fleas and I.

Staying out of the sun as much as I could, I pounded shells all day and slept under the pandanus by night. The sand irritated my sunburned skin and I slept fitfully. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would be awakened by the rumble and bump of gunfire, and I would crawl out on the beach and see orange flashes in the jungle across the sound. If the sky was overcast the flashes would be reflected on the clouds, the same orange but paler and more diffuse. The sound would come a few seconds after the flashes, a series of running bumps or thuds filtered by the distance so that they had a curious soft cottony quality. Sometimes you could see tiny intermittent points of light springing out of the jungle and rising up toward the clouds: anti-aircraft tracers. I watched all this as though it were a distant electrical storm or some kind of astronomical phenomenon, an eruption on Saturn. It had nothing to do with me and after a while it wasn’t very interesting. I would watch for a while, sitting in the sand with my arms around my knees, and then I would crawl back under the pandanus and go to sleep.

Those first two days the wind went on blowing from the west. It was the seasonal trade and I knew it would go on for months except when there was a storm or a local disturbance. I pondered vaguely over ways of getting off the islet, perhaps finding a tree trunk or another clump of vegetation to float on, but the wind was the wrong way and I would only blow out to sea. Anyhow I would probably drown because I was weaker now and probably I would have to swim farther. All this was a kind of daydream, taking place in some rather remote logical part of my mind and not having much to do with my immediate thoughts, which were concerned with pounding shells and staying out of the sun. I had the intelligence, approximately, of one of the more complex insects. I was capable of putting food in my mouth and of pulling off strips of skin, but if a fully equipped motor launch had stranded on my beach I probably would have been incapable of climbing into it; all my instincts were against it. Under the pandanus was Home; it was shady there and there was protection from nature, which was vast and indifferent and perhaps hostile. The food was terrible and the roof leaked but it was no worse than some of the ships I had sailed on. I had been a loner all my life and I had finally reached the paradise of loners. It was almost pleasant. I left the shade only reluctantly and kept the pandanus always in the corner of my eye as I wrenched off clumps of shell in the shallow water, knowing I could go back there and crawl under the shade whenever I wanted. The rest of the world was full of uncertainty, burning sun, water that drowned, and it was better to hold on to what I had and squat there with my knees hunched up under the leaves where it was cool and safe. The insects, the cutting sand, the smell of rotten vegetation were part of it and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

All that second day clouds gathered, and toward nightfall it started raining. The first drops came, hitting the hot beach and kicking up little puffs of black sand, and then there was a gathering patter on the leaves which rose steadily to a rush. The water came down solidly. Under the pandanus I was almost dry and I looked out at the storm, the water running down the black sand, the fleas hopping above the splashes. It went on raining until a little after dark. To the west it cleared a little and I could see stars through the gaps in the clouds. After the rain stopped it was quiet and there was a smell of coldness, fresh like electricity. I sat listening to the water dripping from the leaves and feeling with something like pleasure the sand gritting in the irritated skin on my haunches, the subdued itching of the fleas and the sunburn. They were the price I paid to be out here out of the rain, out of the violence and the uncertainty. I knew now I would go on living out of laziness. Moving little, I needed little, and tomorrow there would be plenty of fresh water in the crevice in the rocks.

The next morning before dawn the sound of cottony bumping woke me up, and I thought it was the thunder again. But when I crawled out into the open I saw it was calm; the sky was overcast but quiet. It hadn’t rained any more during the night and the sand on the beach was almost dry. On the island across the sound there were occasional flashes, and I saw that what I had taken for thunder was the sound of bombing. The noise was heavier than it had been before, a muffled shaking that seemed almost to come up through the ground. In between the thumping I heard the faint sharp staccato of antiaircraft fire. I had never heard this even before when I had seen the tracers, and I thought perhaps it was because the storm had cleared the air.

After a few minutes the bumping stopped, and then a half an hour later it began again. As the sky grayed, the outline of the big mountainous island appeared unusually clear across the sound, and against the jungle I could see a column of ships moving down the coast to the left. A few minutes later they turned abruptly and swung away from the island, and on each ship little flashing pinpoints of light began to appear. It was daylight now and in the clear air after the storm I could see them plainly, a row of high-bowed destroyers with two funnels set well forward. Over the ships a pattern of smoky balls began to form in the sky. There were dozens of tiny puffs, then hundreds until they filled the whole sky over the landing beach. The drifting puffs seemed to have nothing to do with the ships below; they sprang into the sky in silence, expanding quickly at first and then widening and softening as they blew along with the wind.

It was impossible to see what the ships were firing at. I squatted on my heels in the sand watching, still only half awake. The rain had cooled the air a little but it had left it sticky and tepid; collecting your thoughts in that viscous atmosphere was like wading through molasses. Over the beachhead, ten miles or so across the sound, two or three columns of black smoke had formed, rising up straight until they caught the breeze and then flattening and bending to the west. Now I realized that the smoke-puffs over the destroyers were drifting west too; the wind had changed after the storm. The ships had turned again and were almost invisible against the jungle. Occasionally I would see a pattern of winking flashes against the green, and a few seconds later the puffs of smoke would appear high overhead. When the sound came a long time afterward it seemed to have nothing to do with the flashes or the smoke-puffs, which sprang into the sky in the upmost silence. For perhaps a half an hour longer I watched. I was too stiff to stand up and too lazy to go smash shells; I squatted on my heels watching the distant battle simply because it had wakened me up and now it was too light to go back to sleep.

Then after a while I saw something else moving along the shore of the island across the sound, a black spot that might have been an insect. It was moving too fast for a ship, and now and then I lost it against the pattern of the jungle. A minute later it detached itself from the shore and moved out across the sound, and I saw it was a plane, flying low over the water toward me in a wide curve. As it came on it grew larger and expanded into a round dot with the thin line of the wings on either side. When it was a mile or so away it turned shakily and began banking to the right. It passed by my beach so near I could see the red ball painted on the side and the tatters of metal hanging from the crumpled wing. The engine was trailing a thin thread of smoke and it faltered and ran raggedly, as though the pilot was coaxing the last life out of it with the throttle.

When it disappeared behind the rocks at the end of the beach I got up impulsively and went to the water’s edge to follow it. It was going away down the line of reefs that connected the islets, wavering slightly, one wing drooping. It was so low now that it almost seemed to touch the water, but somehow it managed to stay in the air a little longer. Once I saw a flash of spray and I thought it had hit, but incredibly it went on, as though it were held in the air by some kind of continuing miracle. While I watched a crazy thing was happening: my muscles were tensing – upward, my stomach held tight to keep in the air for a few seconds longer this piece of defective machinery that sooner or later would have to smack into the sea. It was a reflex, a visceral reaction – what was this now, I was holding my breath over this Japanese aviator? The logical part of me mocked at this stupid empathy, but my stomach tightened anyhow. The two of us, the pilot and I, strained with our entrails and somehow the plane went on a little father. Then abruptly a geyser of spray rose and it stopped, its tail lurching into the air.

It had come down off the next islet from mine, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the shore. The tail settled slowly back into the water and almost immediately a yellow blob appeared next to it: an inflatable boat. The cockeyed empathy I had felt while the plane was in the air now changed to something else, first unbelief, then a kind of irrational resentment. I watched while the yellow spot detached itself and began moving toward the shore. Who did he think he was, this foreigner, this Japanese? He had come along when I was peacefully sleeping under my pandanus tree, first he had extorted this unwilling sympathy out of me with his tight-rope act, and now he calmly paddled ashore only a half mile away as though he owned the place. The fine perfection of my isolation was shattered. But it wasn’t that, it was because he had made me feel emotion for him, for another human being, I who didn’t even feel emotion for myself! The yellow dot had reached the shore now, and disappeared into the green edge of the jungle. The plane had sunk.

Up to this point, if I had had no particular desire to rejoin the so-called world of men, it was partly because it was impossible and partly because I had tacitly chosen not to admit that there were other men, or at least that they had anything to do with me. The gunfire and flashes at night were natural phenomena like lightning; I wasn’t involved. Now the arrival of the yellow spot on the next islet had changed everything. I could no longer pretend I was alone, and there was a man a half mile away who had a boat. He was there now and I had to relate to him. I didn’t want to relate to him, I wanted to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t, because with his clever rubber boat he had reminded me there was a social aspect to my predicament. He was alive now instead of drowned because somebody else had made the boat for him, whereas I had had to make do with a bush provided by an impersonal river. But you couldn’t get by on bushes indefinitely. Although I didn’t like the idea, I had to recognize that until a few days ago I too had lived as a gregarious animal and cooperated with other men for my existence. I had never felt any particular spiritual kinship with the other human beings on the Chileno Cape, but at least they had provided me with food and shelter and in return I had kept their machinery running. Now I began to perceive that it was impossible for a man to live for very long without this kind of minimal cooperation. I had to recognize that ten or fifteen miles away there were other human beings who spoke English and wore pants and ate ham and eggs, and eventually I would have to make some effort to establish contact with them; if I didn’t I would die. It was an effort which I found terribly boring- but the decision hadn’t been made by me. Living was a reflex, as involuntary as thirst. I knew now it was as impossible for me to starve to death as it is for a good swimmer to drown himself. It was in the way of things. And for me to live, I now began to see, it was necessary for someone else to die.

It was this feeling of resentment over the predicament forced on me, more than anything else, that finally made me angry enough to act. I tramped up and down the beach, kicking at the heaps of detritus along the shoreline and looking for a weapon. All I could find was a piece of rusty wire perhaps two feet long, still attached to the fragments of a shattered crate. This was Excalibur, the shining weapon I was going to use to attack the human condition, solitude, the whole cosmic injustice of things? I threw the wire away in disgust and didn’t even look to see where it had landed. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Later I went back and found it again, and took it with me when I went to lie down under the pandanus leaves, wakeful and brooding, to wait for nightfall.

Instead of smashing shells I spent the rest of the day breaking the crate to make handles for the wire, twisting the rusty ends around two scraps of wood that fitted easily in the hands. I tested it by yanking hard: it held. Then I stayed where I was, waiting for twilight when it would be light enough for me to pick my way across the reef and dark enough so I couldn’t be seen. A little before sunset I took my piece of wire and went down the beach, trailed by a cloud of fleas, my private version of the Egyptian plague. The sand was dry but the sky was still overcast. The water was the same leaden gray as the sky; the leaves stirred in the light breeze from the east. I climbed over the rocky cliff, scrambled down the other side, and came out onto another beach. This one was only a yard or so wide, a narrow path of sand between the jungle and the water. As I went farther even this disappeared and I was walking up to my knees in the sea, the branches overhead so low that sometimes I had to lift them with my hand.

The end of the islet narrowed and tapered away into a sand spit. Beyond this there was the open stretch of water; with the overcast sky the sea had lost its transparency and the shallow reef was invisible. If you watched carefully you could see a crease of foam or a wrinkle in the water now and then to show where it lay under e surface. As I waded out a long-legged white bird settled on the reef, walked around as if to show me how it was done, and then flew off cawing raucously.

I set out gingerly across the reef, the coral sharp under my feet. The water was deeper than I had thought or else I hadn’t found the right place to cross; in places it was over my waist and once I lurched in up to my shoulders. The sun had gone down now, the breeze riffled the water, the mass of jungle ahead was turning dark. Another sand spit led up out of the water on the other side but I decided not to take it; there was no vegetation on it and I would be clearly visible against the twilight sky. Instead I stayed in the water, veering to the left along the shoreline. Here the bottom was a gritty sand and the water was up to my armpits. I was out of the shelter of the reef now and there was more surge from the open sea; it forced me sideways and lifted me off my feet, and once I went under and got a noseful of salt water. I snorted and blew it free and went on.

Staying in water up to my neck, I worked my way down the shoreline to the point where the rubber boat had disappeared into the jungle. The islet was smaller than mine and there were no rocky outcroppings, simply a long sliver of sand with jungle running down the center of it. Now I saw a column of smoke rising out of the trees—he had fire, this oriental Prometheus? I had forgotten I was angry with him, but it was enough for me to look at the smoke, and to remember that he was making me walk up to my neck in water on sharp rocks when I could be lying asleep under the pandanus. I went on working my way down the shoreline until I came to a miniature cove, sheltered on both sides by the undergrowth. Here, dangling Excalibur, I came up out of the water onto the beach.

Crouching to stay below the bushes, I slipped across tire sand and rested for a moment at the edge of the jungle. It was a thick tangle of trees and vines and after a while I began moving through it cautiously, hearing the water dripping from my body onto the leaves. Now that I was closer I saw the islet wasn’t as flat as I had thought; it rose to a slight knoll in the middle, a few feet above the sea. When I reached an opening in the jungle I saw the Japanese pilot sitting on this rise in tire middle of a clearing. He was squatting on a rock with his back to me, cooking his dinner over a driftwood fire. It was getting dark now but I could see him clearly in the light from the fire: shaved head, small brown ears, white overalls. He had fish; I could smell it cooking. These miracles—fishhooks! fire! I had forgotten they existed. Never was the disparity between rich and poor greater than between, me and this Japanese aviator, sitting there calmly broiling a fish the size of his hand over an open fire. His boat was drawn up prudently near him on the beach where he could keep his eye on it. I was naked and he had more possessions than he could use all at once. I was the proletarian, he was the capitalist, and my relations to him were reduced to the basic proposition of all revolutions: die, I want what you have. It was the first time in my life I had taken an interest in politics.

He was only fifty yards away, and at the slightest noise he would turn his head. So far the crackling and snapping of the fire occupied his attention and he had noticed nothing. He looked relatively harmless, sitting placidly by the fire prodding his fish with a twig. From the back he looked older than I was, hair thin on top, getting a little thick around the middle. Did he have a fat wife? Play the flute? Go to the movies? Now I noticed he had a revolver in a holster hanging from his overalls, this well-equipped samurai. I was naked and he was armed; my life depended on his inattention. My own existence seemed suddenly fragile, and for the first time I understood that what I was doing had a metaphysical significance. What did it mean, this sudden and violent gesture the muscles of my fingers were already rehearsing? He and I were going to enter into some kind of a relationship, an event was to link us. It would be the most important event that had ever happened to either of us: I would become the obliteration of his existence, and he the means of the continuation of mine. And yet the roles might still be reversed; if he turned his head it would be I who was obliterated with his ingenious little machine made in Osaka, Japan. I comprehended now at last what the war meant. If it had not been for this political abstraction, the war which I had so far refused to acknowledge, he and I might cooperate; he would give me some fish and I would show him how to smash mollusks. But our roles had been determined for us by politicians neither of us had ever seen; I was condemned to be an American and he a Japanese. Noiselessly, clutching my wire, I went forward in a crouch.

He heard nothing. The loop of wire rustled once and sank in a coil over his head. It was then that I saw his face for the first time; when he felt the wire cut his throat he lunged backward, soundlessly but with immense physical strength. But I was behind him and he was off balance with nothing to grip; gradually he sank back until his body lay across my knee, the cords of his neck distended. Then his head fell back and, he looked up, his left hand slipping slowly across my breast until it reached my shoulder. How strangely he died, pressing his hand on my shoulder, as though he wanted to assure me of something, of his sincerity! It was easy for him to be sincere; I was the one who had the difficult thing to do. For a few seconds we stayed locked together, motionless but trembling with effort, staring at each other. He made no sound but his teeth were bared, not in ferocity but instead as though he were making an immense effort to speak. What did he want to tell me, this flute player, this expert on survival? Perhaps he wanted to give me his opinions on metaphysics, or perhaps he merely had a message for his wife. While he watched me I pulled on the wire, the muscles of my arm swelling and aching. He was strong for his age, but he was in an awkward position, bent backwards over my knee. After a long time he was quiet. The Tables of Law – how easily they shattered! They were only papier-mâché after all. He was guilty too, this bald philosopher who came prepared with his revolver; whatever it was that he and I made we made it together. Everybody is guilty so nobody is guilty. And yet sometimes later I used to see him fixed there like a fragment of broken movie film in his speaking look, his fingers pressed on my shoulder, gazing with teeth bared and eyes astonished as though pleading to be heard you, my copilot, brother, guardian spirit who held me for a moment longer off the water! Well, it’s better not to look in mirrors. How did I get into this? It’s hard enough living one life, let alone two. My victim, you are dead, lie down! Nobody seems to know his place anymore.